"Bathhouse" John and Little Addie

Chicago Daily Tribune, December 24, 1899

A 6-year-old girl lay on a bed in the Harrison Street Police Annex last night and cried because she could see no Santa Claus. She hugged a bob-tailed dog, which she had named "Hobson" and beside her were two ragged dolls. The girl was suffering from the croup, while on the bed next to her her mother was sick. The girl was Addie Stubelfield and her mother was Mrs. Anna Lowe, under arrest for alleged complicity in a larceny committed by her husband on Tuesday. Lowe was employed at Monroe and Peoria streets, and it is alleged he stole $140.

As the child's fever became more severe, she grew restless and asked continually for Santa Claus and his reindeer. She was asking for Santa Claus when Alderman John Coughlin walked into the annex and she begged him to tell Santa Claus that she was hidden away in the police station and hoped she would not be forgotten.

Alderman Coughlin went out and soon returned, his arms filled with toys and books and his pockets bulging with candy.

"These are for the girl," he said.

Then the child asked if her mother had been forgotten. Alderman Coughlin told her that both would be taken to the County Hospital to stay till they were well. When the policemen went to take them to the ambulance the child asked that her dog be taken with her. The police consented, and the child, her mother, the presents, and the dog, were taken to the hospital.

The Harrison Street Station


The English reformer, William T. Stead, chose the Harrison Street Station as the first chapter of his scathing condemnation of vice-ridden Chicago in 1894, If Christ Came to Chicago His description paints a vivid backdrop to the touching scene portrayed in the newspaper article:

There is something dreary and repelling about a police station even in the least criminal districts. But Harrison Street Station stands in the midst of darkest Chicago. Behind the iron bars of its underground cages are penned up night after night scores and hundreds of the most dissolute ruffians of both sexes that can be raked up in the dives of the levee [The infamous "red-light district located South of the Loop].

The illuminated clock of the tower at the depot shines dimly through the frosty smoke-mist, as a kind of beacon light guiding the tramp toward his destined haven. Down Harrison Street, trailing his weary, shambling legs over the dirty snow, he crosses in succession the great arterial thoroughfares through which the city's miscellaneous tide of human life runs loud and fast, until he sees the road barred by the horizontal pole and the spot of green light which arrests traffic across the grade crossing of the railway. The bell of the locomotive rings without ceasing, keeping up its monotone as if relays of sextons were tolling for the victims who that day, as every day, had been slaughtered on the tracks. A patrol wagon full of officers and prisoners drives up to the brick building at the corner of Harrison Street and Pacific Avenue and begins to unload. The occurrence is too familiar even to attract a passing loafer. The cold and frost-keen wind makes even the well clothed shiver. The tramp hesitates no longer. He pulls open the door of the station and asks for shelter.

Harrison Street Police Station is one of the nerve centers of criminal Chicago. The novelist who had at command the life story of those who, in a single week, enter this prim brick building surrounded by iron palings, would never need to draw on his imagination for incident, character, plot, romance, crime — every ingredient he could desire is there ready to hand, in the terrible realism of life. For the station is the central cesspool whither drain the poisonous drippings of the city which has become the cloaca maxima of the world. Chicago is one of the most conglomerate of all cosmopolitan cities, and Harrison Street Police Station receives the scion of the criminals of Chicago. It is also the great receiving house where the police and the bailsmen and the justices temporarily pen the unfortunate women who are raided from time to time "for revenue only," of which they yield a goodly sum to the pockets of the administrators of "justice."

The cells, if they may be called such, are in the basement, half underground. They resemble the cages of wild beasts in a menagerie. There are two short corridors into which the cages open on the right and left, while the remaining corridors have only cages on one side, the other being the stone wall. The floor is of stone. In each cell there is one bench on which the first comers can sit while the others stand. An open gutter at the back provides the only sanitary accommodation. One policeman and one police matron are in command. Each of the corridors is closed by an iron barred gate. The place is lit with gas and is warm, but the atmosphere is heavy, sometimes fetid, and the cages and corridors reek with associations of vice and crime.

Into this criminal stock pot of the city the homeless tramps were thrown to stew in their own juice together with the toughs and criminals and' prostitutes, the dehumanized harvest nightly garnered by the police of the district.

It is true that the tramps were not mixed indiscriminately with the criminals. The women, for instance, were kept in their own corridor. The prisoners were in the cages behind the barred gates, the tramps slept in the corridor between the cages and the wall. There was, however, nothing to hinder the freest possible communication between the arrested men and the casual lodgers. Conversation went on freely between the tramps and the toughs and occasional interchange of papers and tobacco went on easily through the bars of the cages.

The place had a weird fascination about it. It is not a locality where a very sensitive psychic could live, for its cages have witnessed the suicide of desperate prisoners who, while the jailer's back was turned, hanged themselves to death from the bars behind which they were imprisoned. Murderers red-handed have lodged there, maniacs have battered their heads against the iron gates, for there is no strait waistcoat or padded cell in Harrison Street; women shriek and wail in hysterics, and, saddest of all, little urchins of ten and twelve who have been run in for some juvenile delinquency have found the police cell the nursery cradle of the jail. Sometimes when the Justice needs dollars, and raids are ordered in scores that the bail bonds may be paid, there are two hundred women crowded into the cells. Many of them are drunk before they come in, others get drunk after they arrive, having carefully provided for that contingency before they mounted the patrol wagon; all of them, the novice in the sporting house, as well as the hardened old harridan who drives the trade in human flesh, are herded together promiscuously with thieves and shoplifters.

They smoke, they drink, they curse, they yell obscenely, and now and then one goes into a fit of hysterical shrieking which rings through the gloomy corridors like the wail of a damned and tortured soul.

It was into this atmosphere that little Addie found herself on a cold Christmas Eve. The title of the article was, "ALDERMAN PLAYS SANTA CLAUS: John Coughlin Makes Happy Sick Addie Stubbelfield and Her Mother in Harrison Street Annex." I tried to find out what happened to Addie after that night, but, unfortunately, there was no follow up story. I would like to think that "Bathhouse" Coughlin (1860-1938), who ruled the infamous corrupt First Ward with "Hinky Dink" Kenna, was really touched by the child's plea and a bit of Christmas spirit motivated his actions. But, I also know that in just a few months the First Ward Aldermanic elections would be taking place (not that he needed to worry about it) and the veteran politician knew how to use the press.


For more information:
Lords of the Levee: The Story of Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink

Era of "Hinky Dink" and "Bathhouse John" (Encyclopedia of Chicago)

BATH HOUSE JOHN, HINKY DINK & OTHERS: CHICAGO'S HISTORY OF GRAFT & CORRUPTION (Prairie Ghosts)